Sunday, October 18, 2009

Gullie's Collages By TIM KANE, Special to the Times Union

Gullie's Collages

After Robert Gullie promised his family to clean out the house when he retired, the Cohoes-based photographer began to incessantly cut out images from magazines and paste them together in collages described as "destructive recycling."

Nearly two years later, Gullie has amassed dozens of the framed mixed-media assemblages in a funky series of floating heads and forms that marks a noticeable departure for the artist active on the local scene for years.

The digitally enhanced versions of his hand-pasted collages in "Myth Conceptions" at Upstate Artist Guild are a logical extension of his hand-tinted portraitures and landscapes he's closely associated with. In those septia-toned pictures, Gullie fills in odd, often surreal images in otherwise pictorial scenes, while the departure from reality is more dramatic due to the digital editions' more abstract qualities.